Smart Client Deployment To Different Servers
For my current client we have an environment where the application is handed over to a deployment team that installs it onto varying test servers. For good reason these servers are locked down and the development teams can not access them. This ensures a clean install and ensures that the version in the test environments gets moved forward only if there are no issues. Problem 1 - Setup.exe has "baked in" URL This plays a bit of havoc when deploying smart client applications. One of the reasons for this is that the setup.exe bootstrapper has the URL baked...
Checking if you are connected to the internet
I have not tested this but it looks legit:[DllImport("wininet.dll")]private
extern static bool InternetGetConnectedState (out int
connectionDescription, int reservedValue ) ;public bool IsConnected() { int connectionDescription = 0; return InternetGetConnectedState(out connectionDescription, 0);}
How did I miss this? Not that I care.
I discovered an "interesting" feature in vs2003 (and assumedly others).
For a winform application when I went to "add new item" there is an
entry in their called "Data Form Wizard". This little wizard allows you
to connect to a database and build a quick screen that is bound to the
data that you can add, edit, delete from. It looks terrible, it has no
sepration of tiers but if I need to make a quick screen to access a
database this tool saves tons of time. I think there is also an output
to a datagrid so that you can edit in the grid. I don't...
Transparent Backgrounds
For some reason by default user controls do not support background
colors making it a real pain when placing the controls on gradient or
image backgrounds. to overcome this put the following line in the
initilize component method of your user control:Me.SetStyle(ControlStyles.SupportsTransparentBackColor, True)